CampaignPulse
A real-time campaign-health tracker that scores every active U.S. political candidate on fundraising pace, news sentiment, staff turnover, polling drift, and earned-media share, with public 'autopsy' dashboards when campaigns wind down.
Politically engaged news readers and local journalists who want more than horse-race coverage
- Live 'momentum' score per candidate combining five public data feeds
- Automated alerts when a campaign loses 10%+ staff or fundraising in a week
- Side-by-side comparison view of two candidates on identical metrics
- Post-mortem reports for dropped-out candidates showing what actually broke first
The Platner 'slow-rolling disaster' story and similar 20k-search spikes show audiences are hungry for forensic campaign coverage beyond surface horse-race takes, especially when a campaign visibly implodes.
The Platner implosion was covered heavily across mainstream outlets (The Hill, Fox, People, MSN) showing genuine audience hunger for forensic campaign coverage, but that demand is being served by general newsrooms, not dedicated tools — and it is highly scandal/election-cycle driven.Graham Platner's Senate bid ends amid controversy ↗Senate Candidate Graham Platner Sent Sexual Texts to Multiple Women ↗
Campaign Tracker AI already does real-time FEC filing alerts for journalists/insiders, OpenSecrets aggregates FEC data for voters/journalists with dashboards, and i360/Cango serve campaigns directly — the integrated 'health score' angle is novel but the underlying data layer is crowded.Campaign Tracker - Real-time FEC Filing Monitor ↗OpenSecrets / FEC usage guide for journalists ↗
Free public sources (FEC.gov, OpenSecrets) already cover the core fundraising angle; target users (news readers and local journalists) have notoriously low willingness to pay for political data, and no B2C subscription precedent for this category surfaced in search.Browse data | FEC ↗Political Analytics | i360 ↗
Demand is cyclical — peaks during election season and scandal moments, drops off between cycles; the autopsy-archive angle adds some year-round stickiness but does not solve the structural off-cycle valley.
FEC data is free and structured, but sentiment scoring, staff turnover detection, polling drift integration, and earned-media share each require separate paid APIs (news, social listening, polling aggregators) — buildable but operationally non-trivial and costly to run.